


Magic in the in-betweens

by blueberry



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Domestic, Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 20:16:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4193457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueberry/pseuds/blueberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unexpected magic mystery comes on Granny - and she refuses to properly solve it. It was meant to be her day off, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magic in the in-betweens

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertScribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/gifts).



There is magic between the skin of the apple and the meat of the fruit.

Between the peel and the crunchy part! Sparking and glinting away, octarinely! _Honestly._ A person get a day off, scours pots, scrapes out the oven, evict the more stupid spiders from the wrong corners (people preferred to scream about them in the darker ones, for effect), and simply wants a snack before going to see to patching the goat shed in that spot they'd taken a liking to kicking ... and suddenly the air's greased and the world more changed than you'd predict.

"Is somebody playing silly buggers?" Granny Weatherwax said, with an unusual touch of optimism - that was a question that you could rest assured was always being answered with yes, and doubtlessly in many places on the Disc - and yet with a decided sigh to it. There was no sense of interference to the air outside or inside the cottage, or to herself, or to the part of her that she was using to consider herself, and anyone or anything that had tried to burrow in deeper than that would damn sure have been noticed on the way in. Nothing in particular had been affected except her smallest kitchen knife, now placed on the table next to a half-peeled apple and a saucer containing a half-apple's worth of peel.

The knife was sharper.

Not so's you could write home about, if you were away from home in the first place and inclined to write about fine but fairly boring detail. No kings would be showing up at the door with a la-di-dah train of people and horses and cetera trailing off down the walk, here to nick bits of peel off the apple to bless the sword of their birthright, sort of thing - and a good thing, too, or Magrat would give herself fits trying to find a way to get Granny to get people out of her damn garden.

It was just, in a nearly unnoticeable way, a sharper knife than it had been before use.

Magrat, now. That might be someone worth calling on. She'd always been one to try and experiment with witching ... but oh, she would get _smug_ about being called on that way. She wasn't so wet as she wouldn't notice a conversation slipping to the topic of perfectly ordinary, slightly sour apples that might have grown into innate knowledge on the subjects of metallurgy or whetting. The smugness would go right up to the backs of her eyeballs. But it was worth considering that the castle had its fair supply of biscuits, and it would do to give Magrat a quick look-over again, it'd been months since last time and where did time get off to...

In the meantime, Granny was reluctant to give up the apple. She liked them a little sour still. It had looked just right before it started giving off sparks it had no reason to. And was it better to give it to the goats now, or to go ahead and eat the damn thing when she'd been looking forward to a bite after finishing up the thatching and was better equipped to handle stray magic than even your average goat?

Granny snatched up the apple, peel, and knife. Just in case, she went to stand near her hives, far enough that the bees wouldn't expect news and close enough that they would take note if anything should happen to her, and perhaps one or twenty could find their way over to Nanny Oggs' for a sip at that well-tended garden and a word about mutual acquaintances.

There was magic in knowing things others didn't. In getting them to let you use that knowledge without them getting into a tizz about it. In the things in-between, too, the gaps and spaces and balanced places, every witch knew that ... even apples knew it, apparently.

Good apple, by her lights, Granny decided. Crunched just how she liked it as she ate the peeled part. Her teeth probably weren't any sharper. Perhaps the nail's worth of iron in her blood was? Worth keeping a lookout for, at any rate.

The whole world had its in-betweens. It didn't mean magic - did she dare to think _new magic_? - ought to go cropping up any old place. If this thing with the apples caught on, and a few of the kids every month or two kept daring each other to nick from the witch's garden, word might get out. It might be a story that she and her reputation could work with; it might turn out to be something other witches took seriously once they got a wind of it, and expect her to have an answer for. It might even, however little it felt that way now, be trouble.

She turned away from the hives a little to be sure the bees wouldn't think she was talking to them, and started off with a long suck at her teeth. "The fundamental stuff of existence. Birthplace to chaos. Wilderness of the universe, where you can't see the forest for the trees...

"You think you can call yourself unpredictable? I was having a _day off_. Of course some damn thing crops up on a day off! Well known law of nature, practically. The very minute you think you have time to yourself..." She subsided in a mutter quite like the one she used for incantations to impress people.

She took the slightly too-sharp knife and peeled the rest of the apple, keeping her senses trained ferociously on the task.

Not a spark. She examined the peel dangling from her hand; ... nothing there, either.

Granny finished her snack, grinning. No one liked to be embarrassed, after all. Anything that spent any time around her at all would have picked up on that. Even the magic springing from, hiding in, slipping through the meat and skin of an apple.


End file.
